100+ Fantastic Free SEO Tools & Services

To help you analyse and optimise your search engine presence, many companies and shop owners turn to the help of premium SEO services and expensive SEO marketing companies. It makes sense if you have the funds to do that, though you may be surprised to learn that there is a huge number of free search engine optimisation tools and services that can help you improve your search engine presence.

In this article I would like to share with you a large collection of SEO tools and services; all of which are free to use.

Please note that some tools and services are provided by companies free of charge in order to encourage users to upgrade to their premium service. Despite being a limited version of the full service, these tools and services are still highly valuable (the SEMrush free website audit tool is a good example of this).

No premium tools and services are included in this list of resources. Therefore, you will not see many popular services listed that offer promotions such as 30 day trials or $1 for the first month, as these plans charge customers in the long-term.

I hope you enjoy the list 🙂

Website Tools

The following tools and services will help ensure your website design is SEO-friendly so that all of your pages are indexed correctly.

Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, is an important service that all website owners should use. It provides dozens of tools to help you optimise your websites for search engines.

The service helps ensure your websites are adhering to recommended SEO practices and provides analytics on your traffic such as top landing pages, incoming links, internal links, and more. You can also see your Google index information, add sitemaps, and see crawl errors and crawl stats.

Website owners do not always give the same attention to Bing as they do to Google, however I still highly recommend adding your website to Bing Webmaster Tools.

You can submit sitemaps, disavow links, and view detailed traffic reports that show the average traffic, search position of pages, keywords, and more. There are many diagnostics tools and security tools too.

An alternative to XML Sitemaps Sitemap Generator is Online XML Sitemap Generator. It allows you to change the frequency, last date modified, priority, and session information. There is no restriction on how many pages your sitemap may list.

Online XML Sitemap Generator is easy to use and generates sitemaps quickly.

SEO Search Simulator is a free Chrome extension that allows you to easily perform searches from different regions around the world. Multiple search engines are available and you can search using any language.

The extension was released by Nightwatch. It’s a feature packed SEO suite of tools that offers a range of tracking, ranking, and backlink tools. Plans start from $19 per month and there is a free trial available if you want to try it out.

SEO Search Simulator is a useful tool for checking results from different regions.

SEOBook’s Robots.txt Generator makes it easy to allow or disallow search engine agents from particular files and directories. You can add your sitemap URL to your Robots.txt file using this service too.

Be sure to check out their Robots.txt analyser if you are looking for a way to check that a particular page or file is being crawled correctly.

With search engines such as Google placing an emphasis on websites being mobile-friendly, it’s important to ensure your website design looks the way it should on smartphones and tablets as well as desktop browsers.

Screenfly is a design tool that lets you check your websites with a wide array of devices and resolutions. It has some cool features such as screen rotation and the ability to use a proxy server for your tests.

Website Analytics

Google Analytics has long been the de facto standard for website owners to analyse their traffic. You can see traffic in real-time and view information about who your visitors are and how they found you. Behaviour information about website speed and visitor flow proves very useful in optimising your website design too.

In addition to traffic and other stats useful for optimising your website for search engines, Google Analytics provides traffic tools for conversions and integrates with other Google services such as Google Adwords.

SimilarWeb provides a detailed report of your website or competitor websites. The free version of the service gives you five results per metric and displays one month of mobile data and three months of web traffic.

You can consider the SimilarWeb report as a general overview of a website. In addition to giving a global rank, country rank, and category rank, the report highlights traffic levels, search presence, social media traffic levels, and more.

Alexa provides traffic and analytics on every website on the internet. It shows the traffic rank of a website, information about the website’s audience, related websites, keywords, and more.

The service can prove useful when analysing competitor websites as it allows you to get an idea of how they have established themselves.

The Alexa rank of a website has long been used when discussing the value of a website.

Website Performance

A slow website does not just make visitors click the back button on their browser, it also hurts your search engine rankings. Website performance is a ranking factor so you need to ensure all your websites load quickly.

Website performance services will not only advise how fast your website pages are loading, they also explain exactly how you can address the issues that are hurting your speed.

Google PageSpeed Insights analyses your website and gives a desktop score and mobile score. Compared to other performance services, PageSpeed Insights can be difficult to rank well for, however recommended optimisations are presented to help your website get to the next level.

GTmetrix is the performance service I regularly use when testing the speed of my websites. It ranks your website according to dozens of rules and gives you a rating for each rule. For example, you will be marked down if you do not optimise your images or minimise your CSS code.

Their waterfall feature will help you see exactly how long each element of your website takes to load. This can prove useful in determining what is slowing your website down.

GTmetrix shows how long a page takes to load, its size, and its total number of requests.

The Pingdom Website Speed Test gives a performance grade for each page that is tested. The report shows load times, page sizes, total requests, response codes, and details how your website ranked in each area via the performance insights section.

The file requests section works the same way as the GTmetrix waterfall feature by highlighting how long each file took to load.

Web Page Test is a website performance service that lets you test pages on dozens of locations across the world. You can also select the device that it is tested against and the browser that is used.

The report will show you load time, render time, bytes in, and more. You can also see a waterfall of your page loading which shows how long files are taking to load. Multiple screenshots and videos show you how your website is loaded.

Web Page Test gives you a lot of information that other services do not.

Yellow Lab Tools gives pages an overall score and then breaks down the score over many different categories. This includes page weight, requests, DOM, scroll bottlenecks, bad Javascript, jQuery, CSS, and more.

When you click on a particular rule you are taken to a page that explains why you scored well or poorly for it.

Gift of Speed allows you to test performance from one of eight server locations across the world. It gives an overall score, page requests, and total file size. The waterfall feature helps you see what elements of your page are making loading times slow.

Cloudflare is a web performance and security service that allows you to use their content delivery network free of charge. You can can deliver static copies of your content from all of the 188 data servers that are located across the globe.

In addition to speeding up your website and making it more secure, it can automatically integrate a large number of popular products with your website at the click of a button.

Cloudflare does not charge a penny for using its CDN.

Image Optimisation

The following tools and services will help you optimise your images and reduce the overall size of your website pages. This in turn leads to faster loading pages.

ImageOptim is a free image optimisation application that reduce image file sizes and remove unnecessary meta information from images. The main application was designed for Mac, however they provide alternative solutions for Windows and Linux users.

A premium web service is also available, with plans starting at $9 per month for 1,000 optimisations.

PunyPNG is a simple online image optimisation tool that can reduce the file size of JPG, GIF and PNG images. It’s main limitation is that you can only upload 20 images at a time with file sizes less than 500KB. You need to upgrade to a premium plan to remove this restriction.

ShortPixel is an image optimisation service that can provide compression up to 90% in lossy or lossless format. JPG, PNG, GIF, PDF, and WebP image files, are supported. A WordPress plugin is available if you do not like optimising files via their online tool.

There is no limit on the size of the images you upload and you are allowed to upload 100 images per month free of charge. Their premium service is fairly priced, with plans starting at $4.99 per month for 5,000 images.

ShortPixel does not place any restrictions on what image files you upload.

Zara 4 is a great little tool that lets you upload images or import them from Dropbox or Google Drive. You can select three different compression modes: fasting loading, compromise, and best quality. EXIF data can be stripped too.

You can download a collection of various sizes of uploaded images, stretch the images, or crop the images to a desired size. Colour enhancement is available too and you can also optimise images via their WordPress plugin

Zara 4 has some useful compression options.

SEO Page Analysis

The following tools and services will analyse your website pages and advise you of what you have done right and what you need to address. Many of these tools also rank your website and give you an overall SEO score.

Google Optimize offers insights into the behaviour of your website visitors. It integrates with Google Analytics and Google BigQuery and lets you do A/B testing, multivariate tests, and redirect tests.

Other features include a visual editor, segment targeting, reporting, and more.

MozBar is an all in one SEO extension for Chrome that gives you lots of useful information about pages as you browse the internet.

The free version shows you the page authority and domain authority of a page together with link metrics, a page overlay, custom searches, and on-page highlighter. Upgrading to Moz Pro offers additional features such as keyword difficulty and page optimisation.

Keyword Tool can provide up to 750 long-tail keyword suggestions and questions for every search term. All you have to do is enter a keyword at the top of the page and it will generate a huge list of related keywords. You can see keyword suggestions for Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, eBay, and App Store.

Keyword Tool Pro plans start from $48 per month. Additional features include search volume, Adwords information, and an option to export data to Excel or CSV.

Keyword Rank Checker is a handy free tool by Serps.com that allows you to check the rank of keywords for a particular domain.

It allows you to change the search engine, change the search location and language, and change the device. You can also specify the exact location a search is performed (i.e. to mimic a search from, say, Paris, France).

WordStream Keyword Tool is a keyword suggestion tool that shows related keywords and the corresponding search volume. All you have to do is type in a keyword or URL and if you wish, select a category and country.

Premium plans start at $294 per month and unlock all features of WordStream.

Twinword Ideas is a keyword analysis tool that is based on text analysis technology. After entering some keywords you will see a table of keyword suggestions thats search volume, organic competition, paid competition, and relevance.

Keywords can be filtered by user intent, topic, patterns, language, location, and more. It’s very easy to use and suggested keywords can be downloaded in xls, xlsx, ods, and csv formats.

The free version of the service allows up to 10 searches per day and shows the first 250 suggestions. Their pro plan retails at $14.99 per month increases this to 500 searches per day and has no limit on suggestions. Their agency plan copsts $89.99 per month and allows up to 5,000 searches per day across 10 users.

Twinword Ideas has a user-friendly interface with lots of filtering options.

KWFinder helps you find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. In other words, find the keywords you can easily rank for. All you have to do is enter a keyword. A location and language can be selected if you wish too.

The report shows you a huge list of keywords together with a trending graph, search volume, CPC, PPC, and SEO difficulty. It also shows you the highest ranking websites for that term and highlights their important metrics such as domain authority, page authority, MozRank, MozTrust, inbound links, Facebook shares, rank and estimated visits.

Keywords Everywhere is a browser extension for Google Chrome and Firefox that displays search volume, CPC, and competition data, for 16 popular SEO tools and services such as Google Keyword Planner, Moz Open Site Explorer, YouTube, eBay, Amazon, and even Keyword Sh****r.

The concept behind the extension is to reduce the time you spend switching between different keyword planning tools and services.

Google Location Changer is a simple tool that lets you perform searches on every Google search engine and every language. You will find this very useful when researching for projects based in other countries.

Google Alerts lets you set up alerts about…well, anything. All you have to do is enter your search term and then select how often you want to be alerted, what sources to check, language, and region.

Alerts can be emailed to you or an RSS feed can be created that you then subscribe to with your feed reader. I’ve used Google Alerts in the past for a number of projects. For example, whenever a spam website is offering one of my books as a free download, I receive an email notification. You could use it to alert you of news, events, and much more.

Everyone knows that content should be unique. Copyscape helps you detect plagiarism and content theft by searching the web for other copies.

This can be very useful. For example, if you are hiring writers to produce articles for an SEO outreach program, Copyscape will ensure no one submits articles to you that have been submitted elsewhere.

Type a domain name into Hunter and will find email addresses for that website in seconds. An email verifier is available as well as a Google Chrome extension that lets you perform searches whilst browsing.

100 search requests are allowed every month free of charge. After that you need to sign up to one of their plans which start at €39 per month.

SEO Tools for Excel is a collection of tools that integrates with dozens of popular SEO and social media services. It can be used to curate important data from many different services into your spreadsheets.

SEO Tools for Excel can be downloaded free when you sign up to the developer’s newsletter.

A Google SERP competitor analysis tool that provides over 45 metrics about your website and your competitors. You can perform searches free of charge, but you will need to upgrade to a pro plan to unlock all features.

A basic plan retails at €44.90 per month, though you can save 40% if you choose to pay annually.

Getting links on Wikipedia is a sure-fire way to increase traffic to a website. WikiGrabber lets you see which Wikipedia pages need citations and those that are currently linked to dead or broken URLs.

Screaming Frog is an SEO desktop application that is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It has a crawler that helps you discover broken links and duplicate content. It can be use to generate sitemaps and integrates with Google Analytics.

The free version is limited to 500 URLs. The pro version removes this restriction and adds many new features. It retails at £149 per year.

Used by many large internet websites, BuzzSumo helps you see what content is performing best for any topic or for any competitor. All results can be filtered to give you a better understanding of what is converting.

The service is free to use, however their pro plans retail from $79 per month and permit unlimited searches.

Cyfe promotes itself as an “All in One Business Dashboard”. It can be used to track, well, everything. It shows sign ups and subscriptions to your business, social media mentions and follower growth, SEO analytics, network monitoring, and more.

The service is free to use, though the premium version unlocks additional features such as data exports, custom logo, and unlimited dashboards and widgets. Premium accounts costs $19 per user per month if paid monthly and $14 if paid annually.

Who Unfollowed Me is a free social media tool that lets you track those who follow and unfollow you on Twitter. It can help you see who is following you back, who is not following you back, which people you follow that follow back, who you’ve muted, who you’ve blocked, and more.

The service is free for Twitter accounts with less than 75,000 followers and only $9.99 per year for those with 150,000 and $29.99 per year for those with 300,000 followers.

Who Unfollowed Me can help you build your Twitter presence by following and unfollowing.

SumAll is an interesting free social media service that is 100% free to use. It has a lot of cool automation tools. For example, you can automatically thank Twitter users who have engaged with you the most or share your best performing tweet or Facebook post with your followers.

It also lets you post products from your Shopify store directly to your Facebook page.

TweetReach is a service that helps you optimise Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. The service retails from $29 per month, but you can download a Twitter analytics report free of charge that shows a lot of useful information about your Twitter account’s performance.

Social Searcher is a free social media tool that shows related tweets about particular keywords and key phrases. A statistics dashboard breaks down the tweets to give you the full picture. You can monitor keywords and key phrases and set up email alerts to get updates.

100 real-time searches per day and two email alerts are permitted in the free account. Their basic plan costs €3.49 per month and offers 200 real-time searches per day, three email alerts, three monitorings, 3,000 saved posts per month, and all web mentions.

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About Kevin Muldoon

My name is Kevin and this is my blog :) I am an experienced blogger who has been working online actively since 2000. Through this blog I talk about internet marketing, technology and travelling. You can get updates to this blog by subscribing via RSS or Email. Alternatively, you can follow me on Google+, Facebook or Twitter.

I am an experienced blogger and internet marketer who loves working with WordPress. I make money on the internet through blogs, content websites and forums.Read More

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